"Whenever something is exclusive, limited and luxurious, automatically consumer psychology wants it."

"It’s like handbags. Why is someone buying a Chanel versus that? It’s not because of the leathers. It’s to show that they have a Chanel and they can afford it."

Says Nabila Popal, a director of a market research firm, quoted in "Foldable Phones Are Unpopular. Why Is Apple Selling One? The company unveiled a new iPhone that costs $1,999. Here are the economics behind that price tag" (NYT gift link).

I think some high-priced things evoke laughter and You bought that?!

To get you started thinking of some of these things, I found "Wastes of Money Sold to You by Luxury Retailers" (Cheapism). I kind of want the hippopotamus sofa.

"The Amish Are Falling in Love With AI/Cars and TVs might be banned, but some sects are all-in on ChatGPT."

That's the headline at Intelligencer.

[T]here’s no such thing as a single Amish approach to technology.... Daniel is a minister in his church and has played a role in the congregation’s collective decisions to interdict smartphones and social media but to allow e-bikes, flip phones, solar-generated electricity, and religiously curated internet access. “I don’t want to paint a picture that we’re pushing for new technology and we don’t have respect for our traditions and our values,” he tells me....

As far as I can tell, they see generative AI as just another thing computers do. “A computer’s a machine that you tell to do the right thing,” Daniel tells me.

Hasn't Canal Street always been funky?

Man takes a stroll through New York City..

This place is absolutely COOKED. 💀💀 pic.twitter.com/Lc9Yx5kPUd

— American AF 🇺🇸 (@iAnonPatriot) February 22, 2026

I watched that video, and yes, it looks awful, but has it "metastasized" and "gone insane"? It's Canal Street. The voiceover declares it's the "most expensive" part of New York and calls it "Tribeca" and "Soho." It's Canal Street, being Canal Street. 

I looked at those wares vendors had laid out all over the sidewalk, and I'd like to bring some lateral thinking to the problem. The product you see there is almost entirely women's handbags. It could become utterly uncool and dumb to carry a handbag. A handbag is literally a burden. It makes you vulnerable to theft. You don't need it. Designers whose clothes you may not be able to buy make a customer out of you by offering this carrier of their name, causing you to feel that you need it more than you do. Wake up to the post-handbag world and those guys hawking handbags will disappear. 

What, beyond your iPhone, do you need to carry these days? The closer you can get to nothing, the better you are. That's the idea to sell, but who is motivated to sell it? I know I'm being silly, at my age and my distance from New York, to try to influence the anti-handbag trend, which has to hinge on the pleasure and freedom of the consumer, not hatred of street vendors. These are guys making a living, and if your aim is to walk down an uncluttered, uncrowded street, reroute off Canal Street.

By the way, I used to live in NYC — from 1973 to 1984 — and 2 things about me back then: 1. I avoided Canal Street, unless I was swooping into that one place where I bought art supplies, and 2. I never carried a purse, I went out of my way to figure out how to carry everything in various pockets, I had a whole feminist/hippie conception of what I was doing, and I regarded women with purses as embarrassingly uncool. 

"Meghan has struggled to contact her father after his life-saving surgery because she has lost his phone number and he has stopped using his email address..."

"...it is claimed," The London Times reports in "Meghan ‘no longer has’ her father Thomas Markle’s phone number/The Duchess of Sussex is believed to have lost or deleted her father’s number as she claimed to have contacted him by email after his ‘life-or-death’ surgery."

Hilariously... I mean sadly... unbelievable, for about 10 reasons, including the way the "contacts" on your phone hang on steadfastly until you delete them. I just checked mine, and I see names of people I haven't phoned since the '00s. Maybe Meghan weeds hers out more assiduously than I do, but still... deleting your father's name?

"In recent days Meghan has continued promoting the Christmas special of her Netflix show... in which she talks about a Christmas tree encapsulating a 'family’s story.' In a video posted to... Instagram she is seen making a homemade advert [sic] calendar... and saying 'thank you so … honestly so, so much' to the television crew... Markle is yet to meet his grandchildren... although he did receive a call asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage...."

Now about that advent calendar:

"Think of all the lost boys who have disappeared into their rooms, only to return as something unrecognizable, like a modern changeling."

That's my favorite sentence in "Your Phone Isn’t a Drug. It’s a Portal to the Otherworld" (NYT).

I'd make that a gift link but I'm out of them, but I think you can figure it out..

A Lincoln sunrise.

Write what you want! 

"Screen time together is better than individual device time, experts say. Start playing multiplayer video games like Mario Kart on the same screen...."

"Pick a movie or TV show to watch together as a family, without checking a your phone. 'TV is underrated in the age of short form video, if you’re worried about their attention span,' says Devorah Heitner, author of 'Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World.' 'It’s an opportunity to connect, and it’s also an opportunity to have a shared vocabulary.'"

From "The White House is worried about kids’ screen time. Here are five things parents can do. A new MAHA-led report on childhood health has harsh words about screen time, but the reality is more nuanced" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Did you ever think it would come to this, that the situation with children would get so bad that watching more TV would come to be regarded as therapeutic?!

That's a free access link, so you can see multiple other issues, such as the painful dissonance for parents who want to get their kids off the devices but hate to be on the same page with Trump and Bobby.

"It’s a chatbot that encourages people to tap, tap, tap on hand-held small screens as they watch films on a big one."

"Users gain access to exclusive trivia and witticisms in real time (synced with what’s happening in the movie). Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has positioned Movie Mate as a way 'to get audiences back in theaters.' Nearly 20 percent of moviegoers ages 6 to 17 already send text messages during movies even though it’s against the rules.... Why not try to channel that instinct, Blumhouse argues, toward what is happening on the theater screen?"

I'm reading "Chatting in Movie Theaters Is a No-No. But What About Chatbots? Blumhouse, the horror movie studio, has teamed up with Meta on a chatbot that encourages people to use their phones while watching a movie" (NYT).

In the last moments of the film "Sunset Boulevard," the delusional actress says, "There's nothing else — just us — and the cameras — and those wonderful people out there in the dark." But the phones have taken away the dark. The "wonderful people" are interposing lighted screens between each others' eyes and that screen that used to control the flow of light.

The delusion is over.

The audience for the theater of hurricane empathy is vast, observant, and ready to put its critique in writing.

This is the most VEEP-like photo ever -- pretending to be on a phone call but forgetting to plug in the antiquated earphones while pretending to write on a blank piece of paper instead of actually doing anything. https://t.co/tkzHPplKhe

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 30, 2024

Apple's iPhone alarm stopped working and caused some unknown number of human beings around the world to be late for work.

The London Times reports.

The company said it was working to fix an issue with the smartphone’s alarm...

Some users have suggested that turning off the iPhone’s “attention aware features” has helped them solve the issue. This was introduced in the latest iOS 17 operating system and is designed to turn down the volume of alerts or alarms if it detects the user is looking at or using the phone. It can be changed by going to Settings > Face ID & Passcode > Attention-Aware Features....

"One of the books that I find myself tapping on repeatedly—without ever getting past forty per cent, somehow—is Richard Brautigan’s novella 'Trout Fishing in America.'"

"I’m not being compelled by an algorithm. But there’s a surf spot in Marin County that I used to go to which is very near the house where Brautigan, in 1984, died by suicide. Over the years, I told a handful of other surfers about the links between Brautigan and this spot, and later, whenever I would make it back out there, I would see the cropping of little houses on the hill overlooking the ocean, many of them with chicken runs and ruined vegetable-garden projects, and I would think to myself, with a great deal of embarrassment, that I still hadn’t actually finished 'Trout Fishing in America.'... What’s particularly distressing to me is that, although I can imagine a world in which careful regulation and avoidance of algorithms makes phones less addictive, I cannot imagine myself freed from such stubborn vanities."

I'm reading "What Phones Are Doing to Reading/It’s becoming harder, or at least less common, to read the old-fashioned way. But the new ways of reading are not all bad," by James Caspian Kang (in The New Yorker).

"Mr. Haidt has a metaphor... Our emotions are like a galumphing elephant, and our conscious reasoning..."

"... is the rider on top. We may think it’s the rider steering the elephant, but more often it’s the other way around. Our emotions land somewhere, and then we try to rationalize why. 'Almost every social thing I’ve ever tried to do, we had to speak to the elephant, change people’s minds, change their hearts,' Mr. Haidt said. 'This is the first time I haven’t had to do that. Almost everybody’s elephant is already leaning my way.'"

From "First He Came for Cancel Culture. Now He Wants to Cancel Smartphones/The N.Y.U. professor Jonathan Haidt became a favorite in Silicon Valley for his work on what he called the 'coddling' of young people. Now, he has an idea for fixing Gen Z" (NYT).

The "idea for fixing Gen Z" is "no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16 and no phones in schools."

“When you have a system which everyone hates, and then you have a way to escape it, it can change within a year, and that’s what happened in 1989,” Mr. Haidt said. “It’s different from the fall of communism but I expect it to be about as fast as the fall of communism. Because it’s a regime that we all hate.”

We all hate smartphones... or, I guess, kids with smartphones? I went to look up whether Haidt's name is pronounced "hate," and I ended up running into his dissertation: "Moral Judgment, Affect, and Culture, or, Is it Wrong to Eat Your Dog?":

A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner.

"The Justice Department called out Apple for afflicting Android smartphone users with the dreaded 'green bubble' in text messages..."

"... calling it a mark of 'social stigma, exclusion and blame' as part of its landmark antitrust case against the iPhone maker. 'Green bubble' status has long been a source of mockery online, with some women even jokingly declaring that they find men who own Androids less attractive...."

The New York Post reports.

Hey, New Yorker, consider the downside of scheduling your "Daily Cartoon" in advance.

Here's today's cartoon, obviously chosen — I hope! — back when the top news was the dreary deja vu of Congress needing to fund the government again and Biden and Trump tripping and stumbling their way toward another major-party nomination:

  

That seems so out of it, even as it's intended to make fun of New Yorker readers who are out of it. Or was it trying to make New Yorker readers feel sophisticated for feeling bored by all the hopeless shenanigans out there in the world? Whichever, it's painfully crass today.

Is this America — men shuffling in slippers, barely alive?

Apple's new Mindfulness app lets you log in your “momentary emotion” and “daily mood”...

"... compiling a diary of feelings and their causes — perhaps family time makes you happy and time working in front of screens makes you sad — which could be reflected back as insights that might help make things better. [There] was a set of tools for improving users’ 'vision health,' with a focus on myopia.... Using data from device sensors, Apple will instruct users — especially but not exclusively young ones — to go outside, into the natural light, or to move their screens further from their faces....[while also selling you] the Vision Pro, a $3,500 computer that straps directly to your face...."

From "Apple Keeps Trying To Fix Its Users/The company’s guilty conscience is making it nudgy" (NY Magazine).

"Hey Siri, what do you think of ChatGPT"

That's my interaction with my iPhone, inspired by "How Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant Lost the A.I. Race/The virtual assistants had more than a decade to become indispensable. But they were hampered by clunky design and miscalculations, leaving room for chatbots to rise" (NYT).

Just say no.

 

Sunrise with new iPhone.

I'm extremely happy with the camera in the iPhone 14 Pro. It solves a problem I had with the iPhone 12, which was that it made sunrise pictures too bright and I had to figure out how to adjust the camera or tweak things afterwards. The iPhone 14 figured it out automatically. 

The photos above were taken at 7:13 a.m. This is 3 minutes later:

ADDED: Actually, it was this picture — taken at 7:21 — that made me exclaim out loud. I'm pointing the camera straight at the risen sun and it's not blowing out everything. The sun is handled, looks charming, has interesting light around it, and the trees are sharp and dark, and there is subtlety to the light on the snow in the foreground:

"The cameras of Generation Z’s childhoods, seen as outdated and pointless by those who originally owned them, are in vogue again."

"Young people are reveling in the novelty of an old look, touting digital cameras on TikTok and sharing the photos they produce on Instagram. On TikTok, the hashtag #digitalcamera has 184 million views.... Gen Z-ers... are now in search of a break from their smartphones.... That respite is coming in part through compact point-and-shoot digital cameras, uncovered by Gen Z-ers who are digging through their parents’ junk drawers and shopping secondhand...."

From "The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera/Young people are opting for point-and-shoots and blurry photos" (NYT).

"Lots of us have read this book called 'Into the Wild'....We’ve all got this theory that we’re not just meant to be confined to buildings and work. And that guy was experiencing life. Real life. Social media and phones are not real life."

"When I got my flip phone, things instantly changed.... I started using my brain. It made me observe myself as a person. I’ve been trying to write a book, too. It’s like 12 pages now."

Said Lola Shub, a senior at Essex Street Academy, quoted in "'Luddite' Teens Don’t Want Your Likes/When the only thing better than a flip phone is no phone at all" by Alex Vadukul (NYT).

The founder of the Luddite Club, Logan Lane, 17, said she got so consumed by social media during the lockdown that she put her iPhone "in a box." She started reading library books. She wrote something she called the "Luddite Manifesto."